Creating children

Here is a list of steps. Sorry I don't have any screen caps. Some things to note about children are that they cannot interact properly with adults (or smaller children). They can interact with children of the same size. They can be very small, or giants (or giant children if you make even bigger adults the same way).

The coordinate system on which they move in the world will be rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. Its pretty easy to use your mouse accordingly; right/left becomes up/down. This can be obviated by rotating your child's foot disc (using Ctrl drag). The children do not walk as far as the markers would indicate, so it helps to make your moves longer.

All animations will work, with the caveat of interaction mentioned above. I have not figured out smaller doors yet, so door and window types of interaction have the same caveat.

So here goes!

1) Create a polygon with no depth in Sketchup. Just one poly is all you really need. A single triangle would do, but I just draw a square with the square tool. Give it a bright solid color so it will show up easily on your set. Remember not to do and height; you want a 2D poly.

2) Save your Sketchup model as Sketchup 6.

3) Launch MS and select MW (Modder's Workshop) from the options menu.

4) Set your directory from the directory pop-up menu.

5) the upper left menu is the Sketchup importer tool. Click on the menu and select the Sketchup importer. In the pop-up box, use the standard importing procedure.

6) Find the prop you just imported in the master list, and select it. You will now see a poly sitting in the middle of your preview plain. Give it some attributes and tag. The attributes you need are: Scalable, Navagable. You can add others as well, like mobile. For a tag, I just use "Misc".

7) Now select the template for the poly, and set its attributes to Z-float to make the poly easier to see and select. Also select "invisible to camera" and to be safe turn of "casts shadows".

8) Save, login, and publish.

9) Back in MS, find your poly in the set builder. I just filter my search to "Misc" as I tagged my poly. Place it into your set.

10) Select a puppet you would like to use for a child. I customized an existing one a bit with the built in options.

11) Click on director's view, and then click on your poly to place your puppet. A bunch of options will pop up. Use the the one that says "mesh place here". Your actor will appear on top of your poly.

12) Select the set builder, and select the poly. When you mouse over the poly it will hilight yellow, and the puppet standing on it will to. An option box for the poly will pop up and allow you to change the scale. Your puppet will scale along with the poly. Now try moving the the poly. Your puppet will move as well.

13) Select director's view again. Make sure your puppet on the poly is the active one, and click anywhere to create a "move here" You must use "move here", and not "mesh move here". Your puppet will walk in a direction that looks random at first, but with some careful manipulation, you will be able to control it's movement.

I just now thought of rotating the poly in Sketchup before importing to MS. Somtimes that can make a difference because of where polys begin drawing from. I must experiment further.

14) Grin like a fool and make a cool movie. Go ahead and try every permutation of this technique you can think of. You can actually accomplish a lot with it.

How the hell did you figure that one out and it actually works, thats amazing.

RegardsDavid

Of course the bloke doesn't look too child like more of a vertically challenged person

It was your chair tutorial that sent me along the path so to speak. That and a desire to have puppets move about without walking. I was trying to make my dolphin into a chair to have a rider, but I got the twisted coordinates and scaling issue. That made me think there must be some trick to scale puppet. I had played with mesh placement of puppets some months ago, and remembered that characters could be placed in different parts of a mesh. Lucinda had mentioned a character scaling once as well. So it began with static positioning, as the "mesh move" is not implemented, but I noticed that regular move showed up as well, and it worked!